The Tender Bar (26 page)

How could I attend the same school with such a boy? How could we occupy the same planet? He wasn’t a boy at all, but a full-grown man. If I were ever to stand beside him—an unlikely prospect—I’d feel as though I were wearing velvet shorts and holding a giant lollipop. He existed on another plane of reality, worlds removed from me, though there was also something gnawingly familiar about him. I stared and stared until I had it. He looked like Jedd.

Jedd. I wished I could phone him and ask his advice. Jedd would know what to do. But I hadn’t spoken to Jedd in years. I thought of phoning my mother, but that was out of the question. She’d hear the panic in my voice, and I couldn’t let her know I was losing heart on the first day.

Later that night I put Sinatra on my roommate’s turntable and stretched out on the window seat in our common room, leafing through the catalog of classes, which ran four hundred pages. This is why I came to Yale, I thought, cheering up. This would be my salvation. I’d tune out everything else and focus on Anthropology 370b, “The Study of American Culture,” or English 433b, “The Craft of the Writer,” or Psychology 242a, “Human Learning and Memory.” I’d learn Chinese! Or Greek! I’d read Dante in the original Italian! I’d take up fencing!

Then I spotted something called Directed Studies. A program open to a “select” number of freshmen, Directed Studies was a yearlong exhaustive survey of Western civilization, an intense immersion in the canon. I ran my finger along the list of writers and thinkers covered. Aeschylus, Sophocles, Herodotus, Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Aquinas, Goethe, Wordsworth, Augustine, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Tocqueville—and that was just the first semester. I looked out the window, thinking. A group of students was gathering in the courtyard below. Again I saw the supremely confident boy, Jedd Redux, holding forth. The Emperor of Yale. Directed Studies was the only way to compete with such a boy, the only way to contend with his confidence, and maybe acquire some of my own.

I phoned my mother and asked what she thought. She worried that I’d be biting off too much, too soon, but hearing in my voice the need to prove myself fast, she encouraged me to apply. And if somehow I got in, she said, I should skip taking a part-time job as we’d discussed. I should use all my spare time to study, study, study, she said, and if I needed money she would dip into the small settlement she got after her accident.

A new Yale notebook under my arm, two new pens in my pocket, I ran down Elm Street as the bells in Harkness chimed. A few leaves were already beginning to turn. I’d been accepted to Directed Studies, which I deemed an immense honor, though I found out later that the program accepted virtually every masochist willing to work four times harder than all other freshmen. Rushing to my first class, a literature seminar, I thought of all the times Uncle Charlie had told me to stop the clock, stay right there, freeze, usually at just those moments when I wanted life to hurry up. Now at last had come a time to savor.

My literature seminar was taught by a tall rawboned man in his forties, who had a Vandyke beard and eyebrows that were brown and constantly aflutter, like miller moths. He welcomed us officiously and told us about the glories we’d soon encounter, the prodigious minds, the timeless stories, the immemorial sentences so well crafted they had outlasted empires and epochs and would endure for millennia to come. He leaped from poem to play to novel, citing from memory the greatest lines and passages of
The Divine Comedy
and
The Prelude
and
The Sound and the Fury
—and his favorite,
Paradise Lost,
in which we’d soon be making the acquaintance of Satan. He spoke with particular sadness about the loss of paradise, and with peculiar admiration for Satan as a literary character, and it struck me that this professor, with his pointed beard and furry eyebrows, may have modeled himself in part on the Prince of Darkness. I drew a picture of him in my notebook, a sketch in the style of
Minute Biographies,
and beneath it I wrote: Professor Lucifer.

As one would expect of Lucifer, the professor sat magisterially at the head of the table and made a sales pitch for our souls. Everything we would be reading, he said with compelling gravitas, descended from two epic poems, the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey.
These were the seedlings, he said, from which the great oak of Western literature had grown, and continued to grow, extending branches to each new generation. He envied us, he said, because we were about to encounter these two masterpieces for the first time. Though written nearly three thousand years ago, each poem remained as fresh and relevant as a story in that morning’s
New York Times. “
Why?” he asked. “Because each grapples with that timeless theme—the longing for home.” In my notebook I wrote, “Grappled—good word.” Then, seeing that my penmanship wasn’t quite perfect, I erased the notation and wrote it again, more neatly.

I loved the way Professor Lucifer pronounced certain words, especially “poem.” He didn’t rhyme it with “home,” as I did, but with “goyim.” Each time he said the word (“The thing to remember about this
POY-um
—”), he’d rest his bony right hand on his tattered copies of the poems, like a witness swearing on a Bible. Though his copies were twice my age, though their pages were a dark mustard yellow, I could see that they had been lovingly preserved, delicately handled, and underlined with geometric precision.

Our first assignment was to read half of the
Iliad,
then write a ten-page paper. I walked directly to Sterling Library and found a leather chair in the reading room. Beside me a window opened onto an enclosed garden, where a fountain burbled and birds chirped. Within minutes I faded into my leather chair, fell back into the folds of time, and landed with a thud on the wind-scoured beach of Ilium. I read for hours without a break, discovering to my delight that aside from the longing for home, the poem was also about men, and the tinfoil armor of manhood. I held my breath as I came upon the scene between Hector, the greatest Trojan warrior, and his infant son. Hector, dressed for battle, says good-bye to the boy. Don’t go, Hector’s wife pleads—but Hector must. It’s not his will, but his fate. The battlefield calls. He holds the boy, “beautiful as a star shining,” kisses him good-bye, then says a prayer: “Some day let them say of him: he is better by far than his father.”

At midnight I went back to my room, my head teeming with ideas for my paper. I sat at my desk and turned on the gooseneck lamp over my desk. While my roommate snored in the top bunk I opened my new dictionary and made a list of very big words.

Professor Lucifer handed back our papers by throwing them down the length of the table. He told us he’d put as much effort into grading them as we’d put into writing them. He was “appalled,” he said, by our crude analyses of the POY-um. We were unworthy of Directed Studies. We were unworthy of Homer. He looked directly at me several times as he spoke. Everyone fished through the stack of papers and when I found mine my stomach dropped. A red “D+” was scrawled on the first page. The boy next to me found his paper and looked equally stricken. I peeked over his shoulder. He’d gotten a B-plus.

After class I took sanctuary under my spreading elm and read Professor Lucifer’s margin notes, which were written with a red pen that leaked, so the pages appeared blood-spattered. Some comments made me wince, others made me scratch my head. Repeatedly he’d circled the word “somehow,” and in the margin he’d written, “Intellectual laziness.” I hadn’t known that “somehow” was a sin. Why hadn’t Bill and Bud told me? Was there a bigger word for “somehow”?

Before beginning my next paper I went to the Yale bookstore and bought a bigger dictionary, from which I culled a list of bigger words, five-syllable jobs. I vowed to astonish Professor Lucifer, to make his Vandyke stand up. He gave my second paper a D. Again I retreated to my elm.

No matter how hard I studied that fall, no matter what I tried, the result was always a C or a D. For my paper about John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” I spent a week reading the poem backward and forward, memorizing it, saying it aloud while I brushed my teeth. Surely Professor Lucifer would see the difference. In his margin notes he said I’d written my worst paper of the semester. He said in so many words that I’d treated Keats’s urn as my personal urinal. He did not relish my phrase “A poem saved is a poem urned.”

By the end of the semester I’d worn a footpath between the classrooms and my elm, and I’d come to a gloomy conclusion: Getting into Yale had been a lucky break, but getting through Yale, getting a diploma, would be a miracle. I was a good student from a bad public school, meaning I was woefully unprepared. My schoolmates, meanwhile, were coasting. Nothing took them by surprise, because they had prepared for Yale all their lives, at world-famous prep schools I’d never heard of before arriving in New Haven. I’d done my prepping in the stockroom of a bookstore with two mad hermits. Some days I suspected that my schoolmates and I didn’t even speak the same language. I saw two boys walking through the courtyard and overheard one proclaim to the other, “That’s so very recondite!” The other boy laughed uproariously. Later that week I saw the same two boys. “Wait just a minute,” said the recondite one. “Teleological arguments hold no water with me!”

Philosophy was the only class where I did well, because there were no right answers. Even there I was astonished by my schoolmates’ confidence—or arrogance. While discussing Plato in seminar I looked to the right and saw that the boy beside me had scribbled rejoinders to Socrates in the margins of his text
. “
No!” “Wrong again, Soc!” “Ha—not likely!” In a million years I wouldn’t disagree with Socrates, and if I did, I’d keep it to myself.

Just before finals, sitting under my elm and observing its spidery roots as they radiated from me in every direction, I concluded that this was what I lacked—roots. To do well at Yale you needed a foundation, some basic knowledge to draw upon, as the elm drew water through its roots. I had none. Frankly I wasn’t even sure this tree was an elm.

As the first semester drew to a close, I did manage to reach one small goal. I turned eighteen. In December 1982, eighteen was the legal drinking age in New York. Which meant that at long last I could take shelter somewhere other than my spreading elm.

twenty-two
| CAGER

U
NCLE CHARLIE WAS BEHIND THE BAR, DRYING A HIGHBALL
glass and watching the Knicks. From the way he held the glass, as though he might break it over someone’s head, and the way he glared at the TV, as though he might break it over someone’s head, I could tell he had heavy timber on the wrong team.

It was Friday night, dusk. The place wasn’t crowded yet. Families were eating dinner in the restaurant and a crew of early drinkers stood along the bar, each in a posture of extraordinary repose, like New England farmers in a field leaning against a stone wall. Entering from the restaurant I stopped at the edge of the barroom, put a foot on the brick footrest along the base of the bar and stared at the back of Uncle Charlie’s head. Feeling my stare he turned slowly.

“Look. Who’s. Here,” he said.

“Hello,” I said.

“Hello yourself.”

“What’re the Knicks doing?”

“Taking years off my life. What’re you doing—here?”

Like a jury the men along the bar swiveled their heads toward me. I didn’t know what to say. I set down my suitcase and Uncle Charlie set down the highball glass. He plucked his cigarette from the ashtray and took a long drag, squinting at me through the cirrus clouds of smoke. He’d never looked more like Bogart, and Publicans had never felt more like Rick’s Café Americain, which may have been why, placing my driver’s license on the bar, I said something about the “letters of transit.” Without picking up my license Uncle Charlie stared at it and pretended to count the years since my birth. Then he let out a long rolling sigh.

“So this is the day,” he said. “D-Day. Or should I say B-Day? You’ve come to have your first legal drink.” The men along the bar chortled. “My nephew,” he said to them. “Is he beautiful?” There was a deeper murmur of masculine approbation, like a neighing of horses. “According to the laws of the sovereign state of New York,” he continued, louder, “my nephew is a man today.”

“Then the law is
fucked
,” said a voice in the shadows to my right.

I turned and saw Joey D stomping down the bar. He was fighting to keep a frown on his big Muppet face, though I could see a grin behind the frown, like the sun trying to break through clouds. He snatched my driver’s license from the bar and scrutinized it under the dim lights. “This can’t be,” Joey D said. “Chas—the kid? Isn’t a kid?”

Uncle Charlie gave his head a what’s-this-world-coming-to shake.

“Well, the law is the law,” Joey D said.
Wellthelawisthelaw! “
I guess we have no choice. Let me buy the kid his first drink.”

“Nephew, you’re backed up on Joey D,” Uncle Charlie said.

“Backed up?” I’d heard this expression before, but I wasn’t quite sure what it meant.

“You have a drink coming on Joey D. What’ll it be?”

The magic words. I shot a foot taller. “What to drink?” I said, staring at the bottles behind Uncle Charlie. “Big decision.”

“The biggest,” he said.

He wasn’t exaggerating. Uncle Charlie believed that you are what you drink, and he classified people by their cocktail. Once you were Sea Breeze Jack or Dewars-and-Soda Jill, that was the book on you, that was what Uncle Charlie would pour as you walked through the door at Publicans, and good luck trying to “reinvent” yourself with Uncle Charlie.